Are you watching closely?

If you only see one film about 19th century magicians that opens at the climax and flashes back to the beginning, see The Prestige.  If you see two, or if you found Memento jarring and unwatchable, see The Illusionist.  These two films are like two levels of storytelling, where The Illusionist uses magic as a theme to tell a fairly traditional story with a fairly obvious set of twists and turns, The Prestige is itself a magic trick.  It creates an intricate puzzle through which we retreat backwards in time from the climax by descending into two nested narratives contained in two men's journals, two stories whose frayed boundaries indicate that Christopher Nolan isn't going to tell us where the boundaries of the main film lie either.  This film's structure, its story, and Michael Caine and Christian Bale's teasing introduction and conclusion may pretend to speak about stage magic, but they're really about the trip this film takes the audience on, a mystery that lays out all its clues but refuses to ruin the story by telling us the ending.  This is why I say they're two levels of film, where The Illusionist used magic to tell a story to entertain, The Prestige uses magic to turn around to the audience and analyze its own story and tell us, truthfully, why we were entertained.  I just think the less revealed about this film, the better.

I've been accused of being a bit biased towards any film starring Christian Bale (I even liked Reign of Fire) but I also adore Edward Norton, and here's what I thought of The Illusionist back when I saw it.